Looks like everything except the kitchen sink is scortching hot to start the new year. Feel free to add any charts, etc. …
Industrial metals / mining have been hot most of 2022 … Rio Tinto (RIO) shows a 6 month gain of 33% on the Google chart today. Looks like gold will soon break above $900 if it hasn’t already, Miners are up 1-2% today. As
@MikeM noted in another thread recently, PRPFX … is a tamer way to play the metals - and held up relatively well last year. And some REIT funds bounced around 4% yesterday.
Lagging are some of the
consumer staples stocks viewed as more of a defensive play - but still enjoying the ride. One defensive fund some here own,
CCOR, has been struggling a bit lately. Off about 0.50% at the moment - but tends to be highly volatile on an hour-by-hour and day-to-day basis … If you own anything denominated in non-dollar currencies you’ll likely have a good day. In particular the Japanese
yen is doing very well today …
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… GNMA funds have been hot this year … Daily gains around a half-percent common. Some up 0.75% today alone. Have to believe many other investment grade bond funds are enjoying the ride. The first 10 trading days of 2023 seem a
mirror image of 2022 when both stocks and bonds tumbled together.
Other market observations?
Comments
Numerous hallowed momentum indicators kicked in but failed last year so will shall see if this rarer and more powerful indicator is officially it for the bears. Most of the traders out there have already been long YTD so this should give them more confidence this is not another fake out rally.
Hopefully can spend most of my time hiking and away from the investing and trading forums, Too many George Santos impersonators have infiltrated some of these forums.
SC Rally (late-Dec Santa Claus rally)
FFD (first 5 days of the year)
JB (Jan barometer)
Subsequent
Feb
Last 11 Mo (Feb-Dec)
Full Year (Jan-Dec)
Instead of a single pointer, when all 3 are positive (SC Rally, FFD, JB), the year is good.
The question of poster integrity is a critical one that surely affects mfo and similar forums. You are right to raise the issue. Short of submitting to board sponsors authentic documentation to substantiate investor claims (which I know you to have done on at least one occasion) there is no way for readers to know for certain whether poster claims of success are truthful - or even if they’ve owned the funds / assets they claim to. I should add here that I have been most impressed with the caliber of the posters on this forum and do not get the sense, as you appear to, that there are a significant number of “George Santos” posts occurring - at least on regular basis. But I could be wrong.
One here whom I greatly respect, Mark Freeland (@msf), has always astutely avoided identifying or acknowledging any stocks or funds he may own. I can’t speak for Mark, but the reasons he has stated in the past made good sense to me. I will follow in his footsteps and refrain in the future from identifying any funds, stocks or other assets I may own or may have owned in the past. I will also avoid mention of asset classes I may favor or invest in. At first blush I considered going back and similarity editing all such past references made in other threads. But doing so would be grossly unfair to those who responded / participated in the threads with their own thoughtful or helpful remarks.
Thanks for responding to my post. Enjoy the long hike.
Good evening, Derf
I do believe though there are lots of George Santos in all walks of life. How he pulled off that scam is beyond me. Did his opponent never think about checking out his claimed credentials? Lots of blame all around on that one.
@Junkster- Man, are you ever right. Next we'll find out that he isn't even a US citizen, and is a jail escapee from Bangladesh.
This assumes someone is not trying to run a "pump and dump" scheme (which I've never witnessed).
Forum participants (here and elsewhere) informed me of several good investment options
which I was not previously aware of.
I've mentioned my funds/investments and buys/sells in some posts not to brag
but to share information and potentially initiate further discussion.
After all, aren't we here to learn more about funds specifically and investing in general?
I quit identifying individual stocks I own 6 months or so ago. The thinking at the time was: (1) I’m unqualified to evaluate individual securities and could potentially lead someone into an inappropriate investment (2) More selfishly, I didn’t want to be “hyping” stocks I owned on a public forum and possibly contribute to whatever herd mentality might exist (across the internet) - thinking that in the longer run it might work against me.
Thanks for your comments.
Twitter is all lathered up about Mr. Deemer’s breakaway momentum thrust, Zweig’s breadth thrust, a Whaley breadth thrust and more, I am in a small group of retired bond traders from insurance companies and banks and that is all they are talking about too. Even more so since the junk bond indicator has worked so well YTD. I just hope since these breadth thrusts are now so well embraced/discussed/known that doesn’t blunt their effectiveness,
Would be nice if this lock out move up continues not allowing those waiting for a pull back to jump on board. But who knows, The S@P is the most overbought now since last May where it then proceeded to lose several hundred points so say the bears. This current market though in no way resembles the May market other than being overbought. Just look at the daily new highs/lows.
I can appreciate your personal position.
In the past, I've strongly endorsed certain mutual funds which I thought were excellent.
The problem is we all have different goals, risk capacities, risk tolerance, etc.
Now when someone asks for fund recommendations,
I might mention a fund and then suggest further investigation.
Thanks for your reply.
https://vox.com/policy-and-politics/2023/1/12/23551782/inflation-cpi-consumer-price-index-federal-reserve
Couple that with last week’s slowing wage growth is encouraging; the rate hike may become smaller. After a bruising year of 2022, these are quite encouraging data.
Since this paper reaches about 20,000 people, few outside of Long Island may have been aware of his antics.
Link
Several political blogs questioned why Santos's opponents campaign or the national Dems couldn't find stuff that the NYT easily uncovered. I looked into it a bit and found the research paper the Democrats wrote on Santos. ( If anyone is interested I can try to find it again)
95% of it deals with his pro Trump/election denying statements etc, and other than mentioning his education and supposed job history they did not investigate. The one red flag is they did discover he had been evicted for non payment of rent several times, but apparently didn't follow up
My impression was they were so focused on his being a Trumpite ( Thinking it would rile up the Dem base?) , that they failed to make a few phone calls to Citi or Goldman, thus violating what to me would be the first law of politics : Know your opponent.
I shared this info with my uber Democratic cousins and was accused of "always complaining about the Democrats". Tehy refused to believe the campaign was responsible.
I think it demonstrates again, how polarization has so overtaken people's previous good sense and investigative reporting. Even criticism from allies is seen as treacherous
It does appear they were careless and missed several major red flags.
After a down year junk bonds are notorious for big snap back years. So let’s hope the junk rally has legs. January is historically the best month for junk and one of the surest seasonality trades out there,
"Even though the Fed is saying they will not cut interest rates, the market is saying that in three to six months we will have recession, we will have moderating inflation and you will be singing a different tune,” said Andrzej Skiba, head of U.S. fixed income at BlueBay Asset Management. “There is a massive difference between what we are hearing from the Fed, and what the market is thinking will occur.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/13/business/stock-market-gains.html
In election campaigns, there are two principal, not mutually exclusive, approaches. Persuasion (moving people on the fence into your camp) and getting out the vote GOTV (driving more of "your side" to the polls).
Persuasion in a country hewing to tribal allegiances has lessened in importance. As related by Smircornish, Grant Lally (publisher of the North Shore Leader) said that "Santos benefited from generic voting, people supporting their own label regardless of a candidate's individual merit" (quoting Smircornish).
Voters are so wired to their 'R's and 'D's that papers are ending their practice en masse of making endorsements.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/business/media/alden-newspaper-candidate-endorsements.html
Much more important these days is GOTV. Certainly the Democrats could have done more. Still, how much more motivated would Democratic voters have been to vote against a pathological liar than against one who enthusiastically supported a pathological liar?
Santos was a supposedly known quantity, having run for the same position in 2020. People seem to have forgotten that he put out some of the same lies then.
https://ballotpedia.org/George_Devolder-Santos#Campaign_themes
Here's an opinion piece with which I agree. In essence, where was the fourth estate, notably Newsday but also the NY Times during the election cycle? To which I add, or during the last cycle?
https://dankennedy.net/2022/12/23/a-long-island-weekly-had-the-goods-on-santos-several-weeks-before-election-day/